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From the Director
As an increasing number of
groups and conferences
focus on research data, we
are hearing more about the
importance of metadata.
The DDI community
understands how critical
metadata are to intelligent
data use. This issue of DDI
Directions showcases a
variety of activities taking
place to advance the cause
of DDI with the goal of
promoting good metadata
practice.
Mary Vardigan, Director,
DDI Alliance,
[email protected]
In This Issue
Meet the Scientific Board
Chair
Controlled Vocabularies
Group Releases New
Content
New DDI Collaboration
Tools in Progress
EDDI to Take Place in
London in December
International Colectica
Users Conference (ICUC)
to Follow EDDI
Wellcome Trust Report on
Data Discoverability
Highlights DDI
DDI Training to Be Held at
Dagstuhl
New DDI Trainer Selected
DDI Moving Forward
Advisory Group Begins to
Meet
Upcoming Sprints
Announced
Volume VIII, Number 1, October 2014
Meet the Scientific Board Chair
Adam Brown is the new Chair of the DDI Alliance
Scientific Board. Adam’s day job is Manager of
Information Management at Statistics New Zealand,
where he manages a team responsible for providing
library services, document and data management
advice, and metadata tools and standards. Adam has
held several roles in the eight years he has been at
Statistics New Zealand but most recently has led the
design and implementation of a new suite of metadata
infrastructure systems. Adam is also involved in the
international statistical community, being a key
contributor to the development of the Generic
Statistical Information Model (GSIM) and a member of
the UNECE Modernisation Committee on Standards.
In his roles Adam has been an evangelist for DDI and
other metadata standards and has a good technical
understanding of DDI Codebook and Lifecycle. Adam
hopes to bring some clarity to the activities the
Scientific Board is undertaking and ensure that DDI 4
is targeted to meet user needs across the entire community. Outside of his professional life
Adam is proud father of a two-year-old and is a keen handyman around the house.
Controlled Vocabularies Group Releases New Content
The DDI Controlled Vocabularies Group (CVG) has recently published five new vocabularies
and translations of existing ones. New vocabularies are now in place to cover Aggregation
Method, Data Type, Date Type, Numeric Type, and Time Zone, as well as new versions of
Mode of Collection (v 1.1) and Summary Statistic Type (V. 2.0). German and Finnish
translations of AnalysisUnit and TimeMethod are also available.
New DDI Collaboration Tools in Progress
The DDI Alliance has adopted the Atlassian suite of
OnDemand products, which includes Jira for issue
tracking, Confluence for collaboration and sharing,
and Bitbucket for hosting code (Bitbucket uses Git as
a revision control system). More information on
working with these tools will be available soon.
EDDI to Take Place in London in December
The 6th Annual European DDI User Conference (EDDI14) will be held on December 2-3,
2014, at the IOE - Institute of Education, University of London.
NADDI Conference Dates
Announced
Two New DDI Groups
Forming
Open Data Packaging
Organized jointly by the IOE - Institute of Education, University of London; GESIS - Leibniz
Institute for the Social Sciences; and IDSC of IZA - International Data Service Center of the
Institute for the Study of Labor, EDDI 2014 offers 30 presentations as well as tutorials and
co-located events. The keynote speech will be delivered by Peter Knight (Deputy Director,
Head of Research Information and Intelligence, in the Department of Health’s Research and
Development Directorate, United Kingdom government).
The detailed draft program including abstracts is now available, and registration for
participants and accommodation booking are open. The deadline for the early bird
registration fee is November 2, 2014. The reduced rates of the hotels are available on a firstcome, first-served basis. For questions or any other correspondence regarding EDDI14,
please send an email to [email protected].
Institute of Education, University of London
International Colectica Users Conference (ICUC) to Follow EDDI
Co-located with the EDDI meeting in London, the
International Colectica Users Conference (ICUC) will
take place on December 4. The focus of the
conference is practical approaches to DDI metadata
management, innovative research, successful
implementations and lessons learned, and Colectica extensions and tools developed by and
for the community.
Both conferences are hosted by the Institute for Education, University of London. Registration
for the events is separate, and you can attend either or both.
Wellcome Trust Report on Data Discoverability Highlights DDI
In July 2014 the Wellcome Trust issued a report summarizing findings related to the current
discoverability of public health and epidemiology data sets and barriers to access. Several
recommendations in the report relate to the use of DDI.
DDI Training to Be Held at Dagstuhl
A DDI training workshop on “Facilitating Process and Metadata-Driven Automation in the
Social, Economic, and Behavioural Sciences with the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI)”
will be held October 13-17, 2014, at Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics,
Wadern, Germany. Course instructors are Arofan Gregory (ODaF - Open Data Foundation,
Tucson, Arizona, USA); Wendy L. Thomas (MPC - Minnesota Population Center, Minneapolis,
Minnesota, USA); and Joachim Wackerow (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences,
Mannheim, Germany).
The focus of the workshop will be on the Lifecycle branch of DDI, Version 3.2, which
provides a detailed model of the metadata needed to support both human-driven and
automated processing. The workshop will be organized in a task-oriented manner, with
participants actively documenting real-world use cases in order to learn how best to employ
the DDI model and associated technology. The use cases produced can be published as the
final output of the workshop, as a resource to the broader DDI community. Participants are
encouraged to bring their own organizational use cases.
Schloss Dagstuhl, Leibniz Center for Informatics, in Wadern, Germany
New DDI Trainer Selected
The Alliance is pleased to announce that Jon Johnson, University of London, International
Education Office, has been selected as the new DDI trainer. Jon brings to the position a
wealth of experience in managing and documenting longitudinal data as well as an extensive
network of audiences for DDI training.
Jon will spend a week in Mannheim in October with the other Dagstuhl trainers -- Arofan
Gregory, Wendy Thomas, and Joachim Wackerow -- and will then participate in the training
workshop at Dagstuhl the following week (see above). The goal is for Jon to gain expertise in
the training arena so that he can then run DDI workshops himself in other venues.
There were 10 applicants for this training opportunity, which was a great response. The
Alliance hopes to offer a similar opportunity in the future.
DDI Moving Forward Advisory Group Begins to Meet
There was an animated discussion at the Toronto meeting in June about an Advisory Group
(AG) to oversee DDI 4 development and govern the project. This AG has been set up and
has held several meetings so far. The Advisory Group terms of reference and minutes of past
meetings are available on the DDI wiki.
Scientific Board Chair Adam Brown notes that he sought nominations from the community to
ensure a wide range of representation. The AG group membership consists of:
Adam Brown (Chair), Statistics NZ
Joachim Wackerow, GESIS
Larry Hoyle, University of Kansas
Dan Gillman, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Arofan Gregory, Metadata Technology
Wendy Thomas, Minnesota Population Center
Steve McEachern, Australian Data Archive
Mary Vardigan, ICPSR
Kelly Chatain, Survey Research Operations, University of Michigan
Upcoming Sprints Announced
Plans are in place for the next two DDI sprints, to be held at Schloss Dagstuhl on October
20-24, 2014 (Sprint 5), and at the Institute of Education, University of London, on November
24-28 (Sprint 6). The Dagstuhl sprint, which will include 10 people funded by an NSF grant
on enhanced citation, will focus on data citation, and on finalizing Simple Data Description
and Simple Instrument with additional work done on Simple Codebook. Complex Data
Description and Complex Instrument will also be addressed as will Qualitative Data and
Methodology.
The London sprint will be dedicated to technical work with a focus on refining the renderings
to XML and RDF; refining the production framework; technical modeling of new content;
production of packages for review; and presentation tools (XSLT) for producing
documentation.
In keeping with the Agile approach to development, there are targeted deliverables for each
sprint, and the Advisory Group has endeavored to invite people with the requisite skills to
ensure completion of the work. Please get in touch with Adam Brown, Chair of the DDI
Scientific Board, if you have any questions or comments.
NADDI Conference Dates Announced
The 2015 North American DDI Users Conference, with the theme “Research Data
Management: Enhancing Discoverability with Open Metadata Standards,” will take place in
Madison, Wisconsin, on April 8-10, 2015. The host of the conference is the Institute on Aging
(IOA) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The North American Data Documentation Initiative Conference (NADDI) is an opportunity for
those using metadata standards and those interested in learning more to come together and
learn from each other. NADDI 2015 will be a three-day conference (April 8-10) with invited
and contributed presentations, and should be of interest to both researchers and data
professionals in the social sciences and other disciplines. A full day of training sessions will
precede the conference (April 8th).
Follow @NADDI2015 on Twitter!
Key Dates:
Open registration:
10/1/14
Open call for papers:
11/1/14
Submissions closed:
1/31/15
Acceptance notifications:
2/8/15
Early Bird registration ends:
3/15/15
Final versions of papers due: 3/31/15
Two New DDI Groups Forming
Training Group. At the Toronto meeting of DDI members, training was discussed with the
goal of forming a group to address training issues. Subsequently the DDI Executive Board
developed some recommendations related to the DDI Training Principles, and a small group
has begun to meet. If you would like to join the team, please contact the Director.
Partnerships and Marketing Group. The need for a group to focus on marketing and
partnerships was also discussed in Toronto with the objective of investigating and
implementing new strategic alliances. To that end, a group has been formed with
responsibility for such partnerships and for the broader area of marketing in general. To join
this group, please contact the Director.
Open Data Packaging
Metadata Technology North America (MTNA) announces Open Data Packaging Services,
designed to help transform datasets or databases into an open data package, ready for
publication, analysis, long term preservation, or other purposes.
Leveraging MTNA technology and expertise, MTNA data
and technology experts convert proprietary files or
databases into open data packages, holding the
information in ASCII text format, accompanied with core
documentation and all necessary scripts and program for
reading the data back into commonly used statistical
software or analytical engines.